Theresa Thorson

Some people move through life hoping the road ahead will remain reasonably predictable.

Theresa Thorson has never seemed to expect that.

Her life has taken her from a childhood in Central Oregon to a career helping troubled young people, from marriages and losses to motherhood she never planned, from difficult periods in her own life to years of travel, friendship, dancing and community involvement.

Through much of it runs a remarkably consistent idea.

There is usually a next step.

Theresa learned something about that when she was still a girl. At about ten years old, she sat in an audience knowing she could perform a challenge taking place onstage but too frightened to stand up and try. Someone else did it instead.

She went home angry with herself.

From then on, Theresa tried to distinguish between I don't want to do this and I'm afraid to do this.

It became more than a childhood lesson.

Years later, stranded in Beijing with a friend who desperately needed a bathroom, Theresa got off a tour bus without knowing the language or quite knowing where she was. They would figure it out.

They did.

Working with young people, she learned not to become too interested in labels. A child might have failed somewhere else, broken rules or made terrible decisions. Theresa wanted to know something different: What did this particular young person need in order to succeed at whatever came next?

Then life required her to ask similar questions of herself.

She became a mother unexpectedly. She loved more than once and lost more than once. She confronted her own problems with alcohol. She returned to Redmond and discovered that retirement did not mean she was finished being useful. At the Senior Center she found dancing, friendship, responsibility and eventually another place where her ability to organize people and solve problems mattered.

Theresa describes herself as independent—a “lone wolf”—but that doesn't mean she has lived apart from other people. Quite the opposite. Much of her life has been spent among them: helping them, learning from them, arguing with them, laughing with them and occasionally organizing them when she thought something needed to get done.

She has traveled widely and remained curious. She has made mistakes and talks about many of them with unusual openness. She has also learned that losing something important does not require losing everything that comes afterward.

Perhaps that is why one of Theresa's simplest statements says so much about her.

“In life for me, there's always a solution.”

The solution isn't always the one she expected.

Sometimes it means changing direction. Sometimes it means asking someone else for help. Sometimes it means admitting that Theresa herself needs to change.

And sometimes it simply means playing the hand that arrived that morning and seeing what can be made of it.

These stories are only part of Theresa's life, and they are not finished yet.

Neither, for that matter, is Theresa.

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